Latest Technology

The shadow president paced around the stage after his speech, sunglasses on, mouth frozen in a grin, raising a chainsaw overhead to the delight of an adoring crowd as a large rectangular canvas made its way from the back of the audience toward him. He grabbed the painting, visibly thrilled. On the canvas, as onstage, he was the focal point. Beams of light emanated from his head, which the artist had superimposed over scenes from the world his real-world counterpart had promised to build: an astronaut surveying a barren red planet, a futuristic civilization complete with flying cars. In the painting, he wore a suit and tie. His real-world attire was more casual: a black blazer over a novelty T-shirt that read “I’m not procrastinating, I’m doing side quests,†a gold chain, his signature “dark MAGA†hat, and the aforementioned sunglasses. In the painting, he was triumphant. Onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), however, Elon Musk had appeared incoheren...

Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia has joined President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) service. Gebbia, a close friend of Elon Musk and fellow billionaire, announced that he’s been tasked with “improving the slow and paper-based retirement process,” though the specifics of his involvement are unclear. “Excited to share I’m bringing my designer brain and start-up spirit into the government,” Gebbia announced on X . “I can think of few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government.” Musk has complained that the current system for processing retirement applications is too slow and restrictive due to using manually checked paper records. A converted mine in Pennsylvania is currently used to store and process 400 million printed government documents, taking up 26,000 filing cabinets. The US Office of Personnel Management announced on Thursday that it had processed an entire retirement application digitally for the first ...

The Aurzen Zip is super small and portable. Tri-folds are having a moment. There’s that impressive Huawei device , my favorite 3-in-1 Apple charger , and now this: the Zip tri-fold projector from a company called Aurzen. It’s the most gadgety gadget I’ve tested in a long time. The Zip’s heft, texture, and hinge stiffness evokes quality at first touch and it’s impressively bright for a compact battery-powered projector that initially costs $249. Using it is also a joy. It connects quickly to iPhones over AirPlay and to Android devices over Miracast, Smart View, or similar using Wi-Fi Direct — no hotspot required. It then automatically focuses and aligns the image on any available flat surface including walls, t-shirts, and pillows. It works in both landscape and portrait modes and pairs with Bluetooth headsets for private audio or Bluetooth speakers for a shared experience. The built-in rechargeable battery lasts about 80 minutes in my real-world testing, but you can a...

Sony is cutting the price of its PlayStation VR 2 headset in March. The VR 2 will be discounted to just $399.99, down from the original $549 pricing when it launched in February 2023. The headset will also see a price cut in Europe (€449.99), the UK (£399.99), Japan (¥66,980), and other regions. Sony is positioning the price cut as a “fantastic time to dive into the exciting world of PS VR2,” but it also comes nearly a year after the company reportedly paused PSVR 2 production to clear excess inventory nearly . A Bloomberg report in March suggested Sony was trying to shift unsold inventory of the VR2 headset, and this fresh price cut suggests that the PS5 accessory still isn’t selling as well as Sony had hoped. At $549, it was more expensive than the PS5 itself, and a lack of content has certainly held it back. The $399 pricing could certainly help shift units, particularly as you can also use the VR 2 headset on a PC now thanks to Sony’s $60 adapter . Sony is also reportedly wo...

Instagram is reportedly considering spinning its Reels feature into a standalone short-form video app to take advantage of TikTok’s uncertain future in the US. Instagram head Adam Mosseri was overheard discussing the plans with staff this week according to an anonymous source cited by The Information . The Reels app is reportedly part of a Meta initiative code-named Project Ray which aims to help Instagram better compete against TikTok. Plans include improving how Instagram content is recommended and bringing more three-minute-long Reels videos to users in the US.  TikTok has around 170 million US users and still faces a ban after being given a 75-day extension by President Donald Trump in January. During TikTok’s temporary removal from app stores last month, Instagram released Edits — a blatant riff on the CapCut video editing app owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance — and allegedly tried to lure creators to its own platform with cash bonuses. It’s unclear if Reels w...

Xiaomi has announced its 15 Ultra flagship phone at a launch event in China, where it’s going on sale starting at 6,499 yuan (around $893). The Android phone joins the company’s Xiaomi 15 and 15 Pro, which went on sale there in October 2024. It is a mostly iterative upgrade on last year’s model, but the big change is the addition of a 200-megapixel periscope camera that the company says excels in low light. The 15 series, including the Ultra, is getting an international launch this Sunday, March 2nd , at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Exactly which markets it will go on sale in remains to be seen, but it’s a safe bet that this one won’t be coming to the US. Xiaomi’s Ultra line has always been camera-centric, even more so than Samsung or Apple’s top models, and the 15 Ultra is no different. Like last year’s 14 Ultra , the quad rear camera is arrayed in an enormous circular module on the phone’s rear. It’s designed to resemble photography partner Leica’s dedicated camera hardware,...

YouTube isn’t a podcast app, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming the number one place people who want to consume online radio shows now turn to. According to the company, a staggering 1 billion people are tuning into podcasts every month on YouTube. That’s not just more than either Apple or Spotify can claim — it utterly lays them to waste.  In 2023, Spotify reported it had 100 million regular podcast listeners, and touted that half a billion people had listened to a podcast on its platform since 2019 when it started its push into the world of online radio shows. Apple tends to come out behind Spotify in third-party measurements . If a full eighth of the world’s population uses YouTube for podcasts, it seems like that’s probably where the action is.  Reaching that big chunk of audience takes extra work for podcasters, though. Listeners can’t turn just off their phone’s screen to listen unless they’re paying for YouTube Premium , and people may not want to stare at a...

Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs are just around the corner, with the first releases — the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 — dropping on January 30th. The RTX 5070 Ti and RTX 5070 will follow that with their own releases in February, but some are already getting a sneak peek at the software benefits of the GPUs through DLSS 4. Tom Warren’s Verge review of the $1,999 RTX 5090 indicates it’s expectedly a powerhouse but not quite the generational leap that the RTX 4090 was over its own predecessor. That didn’t stop The Verge ’s Sean Hollister from being impressed with the two-slot RTX 5090 Founders Edition GPU when he stuffed it into his aging small form factor PC . Along with the 50-series GPUs comes DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation , a software trick that may be just as big of a story as the hardware itself. This latest version of DLSS uses AI to predictively generate frames, making it possible to run games at higher resolutions without taking the same frame rate hit they would without DLSS 4 t...

It looks like Samsung may have an answer to Oppo’s Find N5 after all, as new leaks claim that the Galaxy Z Fold 7 will only be fractionally thicker than the world’s thinnest foldable. That’s according to renders created by OnLeaks based on leaked information. OnLeaks, together with Android Headlines , reports that the Z Fold 7 will be just 4.5mm thick when open. The Find N5 — currently the world’s thinnest book-style foldable — is 4.2mm thick, and the previous record-holder, Honor’s Magic V3 , is 4.4mm.  That would put Samsung right up there with the global competition, and make this quite comfortably the thinnest foldable phone in the US. Its Z Fold 6 is 5.6mm thick, and Google’s Pixel 9 Pro Fold runs to 5.1mm. The OnePlus Open is the thickest at 5.8mm, and the company has already confirmed it has no plans for a new foldable model this year. The Z Fold 7’s dimensions when closed are a little less clear. The report says that the phone will be 9.5mm thick counting ...

Today is the third anniversary of Valve’s Steam Deck, the handheld gaming PC that all but created the market for handheld gaming PCs. It was a mess to start ! But three years later, The Verge has data showing how it has dominated the nascent market. While Valve told us in November 2023 that it had sold “multiple millions†of the AMD-powered handheld, we’ve never had a good glimpse at how big it is or how Windows competitors stack up… till now. It seems the Steam Deck, so far, has been bigger than all its competitors combined. Market research firm IDC uses supply chains to estimate just how many handheld gaming systems have shipped around the world, and creates spending forecasts . When I asked IDC market research analyst Lewis Ward if he’d be willing to isolate SteamOS and Windows gaming handhelds from that data, he said yes. So here are the estimated combined shipments of the Steam Deck, and the Windows-based Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, and MSI Claw from 2022 thro...

A free version of Gemini Code Assist, Google’s enterprise-focused AI coding tool, is now available globally for solo developers. Google announced today that Gemini Code Assist for individuals is launching in public preview, aiming to make coding assistants “with the latest AI capabilities” more accessible for students, hobbyists, freelancers, and startups. “Now anyone can more conveniently learn, create code snippets, debug, and modify their existing applications — all without needing to toggle between different windows for help or to copy and paste information from disconnected sources,” said Ryan J. Salva, Google’s senior director of product management. “While other popular free coding assistants have restrictive usage limits, with usually only 2,000 code completions per month, we wanted to offer something more generous.” That feels particularly targeted at GitHub Copilot, the most direct competitor to Gemini Code Assist, which also provides a free user tier that’s limited to 2,0...

Microsoft has started testing a free version of Office for Windows that includes ads. Right now, you have to pay for a monthly Microsoft 365 subscription to get access to the full desktop version of Office, but Microsoft has been quietly testing an ad-supported version in certain countries. Beebom first noticed that the ad-supported version of Office for Windows appeared in India recently, allowing Windows users to access Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Office apps without the Microsoft 365 subscription fee. “Microsoft has been conducting some limited testing. Currently, there are no plans to launch a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Office desktop apps,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to PCWorld . While Microsoft claims this is limited testing, the company has specifically engineered its Office apps to now work on Windows with ads, so we may well see this version appear in more markets eventually. The ad-supported version of Office includes banners that ...

Your phone comes with a number of useful features that we hope you’ll never have to use — and crash detection falls into that category. Movement sensors detect when you’re driving — and when you come to a sudden and abrupt stop. Your phone or watch can then alert emergency services, along with family and friends, even if you’re incapacitated.  The feature is available on Pixel phones starting with the Google Pixel 4A, which launched in 2020. (It has been rumored that crash detection is built into the Galaxy S25 series phones as well, but if it is, Samsung hasn’t enabled the feature yet.) It is also an option on the Pixel Watch 2 and 3. When a crash is detected, your phone and watch both sound an alarm and ask if something has happened. If you’re using a phone and a wearable together, you’ll see an alert on both screens, and you can reply on either device. The slider options you get are I’m OK (to cancel the alarm) or Call 911 & notify contacts (to go ahead an...

In order: The iPhone 17 “Air,” iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro Max, and iPhone 17 Pro. | Image: <a href="https://ift.tt/3r9tLQx Bu</a> Apple is several months away from launching the iPhone 17 series but a significant camera redesign may be on the horizon. Leaker Majin Bu has shared CAD renders of what are purported to be the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, 17 Pro Max, and the rumored iPhone 17 Air — with the latter three all featuring Pixel-like rectangular camera bars. The new CAD renders show the rear camera bars on the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max models stretched to extend their currently square design, now reaching across the entire upper body. They still retain the rounder edges seen on the current models. The 17 “Air” features a similar design, albeit with only a single rear camera lens. According to these renders, the camera module on the standard iPhone 17 model will be largely unchanged, differentiating it from the premium models. Majin Bu is an established leaker but, as MacR...

Investigators examine the wreckage of a Delta Air Lines plane a day after it crashed upon landing at Toronto Pearson International Airport in Toronto, Ontario. | Image: AFP via Getty Images First, let’s lay out the facts. Four commercial jet crashes have occurred in the last 10 weeks: Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 on Christmas Day; Jeju Air Flight 7C2216 on December 29th; American Airlines Flight 5342 on January 29th; and Delta Connection Flight 4819 on February 17th. There have been several private airplane crashes in the news recently, too, from the air ambulance crash in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, just before the Super Bowl to the mid-air collision in Scottsdale, Arizona, only last week. In fact, data from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) shows that there have been 13 fatal airplane crashes in the United States alone since the beginning of the year, including both private and commercial aviation.  That’s just what is happening in the sky. On the...

Apple has announced plans to invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including hiring 20,000 new employees and launching a new server factory in Texas. The announcement was teased after a meeting last week between CEO Tim Cook and President Donald Trump, and comes as the company tries to mitigate the business impact of Trump’s trade tariffs, with a 10 percent tariff already in effect on goods imported from China, and a 25 percent tariff threatened for chips. The announcement echoes one Apple made in early 2018 , during the first Trump administration. At that point Apple also promised 20,000 new jobs as part of a $350 billion spend in the US, alongside a new campus in Austin which is still under construction . The company successfully appealed for tariff exemptions for some of its products, and a new US investment may be a way to secure further protection from Trump’s new charges. Apple has not confirmed how many of the new investments were already plan...

Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that federal workers would soon get an email “requesting to understand what they got done last week.” According to the New York Times , the email from the Office of Personnel Management went to agencies across the federal government that afternoon, including the FBI, State Department, and others, with a deadline for response by 11:59PM ET on Monday.  However, the message lacked a detail from Musk’s tweet, according to the Times , where he said, “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation,” which a number of lawyers have said would be illegal.  The Washington Post reports that experts said it “may be asking some recipients to violate federal laws,” and Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor quoted by the Times , said, “There is zero basis in the civil service system for this.”  House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Sunday that “Elon Musk is traumatizing hardworking federal employees, their children...

Hades II just received its second major update as part of its early access development, which was a great  excuse for me to jump back in. Since its initial release, I’ve logged more than 30 hours and actually held myself back from playing much more – I don’t want to get tired of the game before it hits 1.0 – but with the new update, I wanted to see what’s new and try to beat the new final boss on my very first run. Sadly, I haven’t even been able to see what the boss is yet. I did make it to the update’s new region, but I got destroyed by a dangerous miniboss. Still, I’ve still been really impressed with what Supergiant Games has added since May to make what’s already a very good game even better. The big additions are impressive. Hades II initially launched with six regions — four for an Underworld route and two for a “surface†route — and with each major update, Supergiant has added a new region with new enemies, characters, and music to round out ...

Last year’s M3 MacBook Airs. Apple is readying its MacBook Air line for an update to M4 chips in March, according to Bloomberg ’s Mark Gurman in today’s Power On newsletter . With the slim laptops’ spec bump, the MacBook line’s M4 transition will be complete. Gurman didn’t provide timing beyond that the laptops are coming next month, but as usual before it launches a product, Apple is “preparing its marketing, sales and retail teams for the debut” and letting its retail stock of the laptops clear out. Both the 13-inch and 15-inch models are expected to come at the same time, like last year. Since the Apple Silicon transition, the MacBook Airs have largely shared specs with the low-end MacBook Pro, just packed into a slimmer laptop with omissions like fewer ports and no cooling fan. The base model 14-inch Pro starts with 10-core CPUs and 10-core GPUs and feature 16GB of RAM — you can get a sense of that configuration’s performance from our review of the base M4 MacBook Pro . Ideal...

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 72, your guide to the best and Verge -iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, hope you like gadgets, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage .)  This week, I’ve been reading about Hasan Piker and calculator apps and car thieves and the real economics of YouTuber life , using my month of Paramount Plus to watch Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Yellowjackets , replacing my big podcast headphones with the Shure SE215 in-ear headphones, switching all my reading out of the Kindle ecosystem for increasingly obvious reasons , and taking copious notes on Kevin Kelly’s 50 years of travel tips . I also have for you Apple’s slightly confusing latest smartphone, a couple of new things to watch this weekend, the best new Xbox game in a while, and much more. Also, the first part of our group project on all the ways we listen to music. Let’s do this. (As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas...

The fuzz of the cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor, alongside static grains and flickering scanlines, is a touchstone for ’90s-era nostalgia. It’s shorthand for those halcyon days when technology was predominantly analog and millennial kids spent their summers shoving bulky tapes into VHS players, recording favorite bits of their after-school television shows, and making their own home videos with camcorders. It’s this vignette that developer Don’t Nod Montréal leans heavily into in Lost Records: Bloom & Rage. The game follows a blossoming friendship — and apparent falling-out — of four teenagers over an unforgettable summer. And it all starts with a good dose of that nostalgia: the ubiquitously blue anti-drug message that precedes the title screen, complete with the telltale flicker of a CRT monitor. Such adolescent longing is all par for the course for Don’t Nod. Alongside Telltale , the studio popularized the choose-your-own-adventure style of narrative games with ...

The Lenovo Legion Go S was supposed to change things. It was poised to show Valve isn’t the only one that can build an affordable, portable, potent handheld gaming PC — you just need the right design and the right OS.  I was intrigued when Valve’s own Steam Deck designers told me this Windows handheld would double as the first authorized third-party SteamOS handheld this May. When I heard Lenovo had procured an exclusive AMD chip that would help that SteamOS version hit $499, I got excited for a true Steam Deck competitor.  But I’m afraid that chip ain’t it.  I’ve spent weeks living with a Legion Go S powered by AMD’s Z2 Go, the same chip slated to appear in that $499 handheld. I’ve used it with both Windows and Bazzite, a SteamOS-like Linux distro that eliminates many of Windows’ most annoying quirks . I tested both directly against a Steam Deck OLED and the original Legion Go , expecting to find it between the two in terms of performance and batt...

Die in the Dungeon is a new roguelike deckbuilder that pulls some ideas from Slay the Spire , one of my favorite games, but adds some dice-based twists that have me hooked. In Dungeon , your goal is to survive through progressively harder maps of enemies by building a deck — but instead of collecting cards, you’re collecting dice. During every hand, you have a certain amount of energy you can use to play your dice. And since you can see every move your enemies will make on the next turn, the game is mostly about strategizing how to attack the baddies while defending yourself. If you’ve played Slay , this setup should feel pretty familiar. But Dungeon ’s clever twist is in how you play. At the beginning of each turn, the game will roll dice from your deck into your hand, and you’ll need to decide how to play them on a board. Each die has a value, so the higher the value, the more damage you’ll deal or block you’ll set up to defend yourself. There are multiple types ...

Android Auto users are experiencing wireless connectivity issues following its recent updates. As seen by Android Authority , some Reddit users report that attempting to wirelessly connect to vehicles via the Android platform is causing their phones to reboot. Others are finding that wireless connectivity is refusing to work entirely. Google told The Verge that its team is “aware of the issue” and is “currently investigating a fix.” No ETA has been provided. We will update this story when more information or a solution is available. In recent weeks, some phones have only worked with Android Auto using a wired connection, according to several complaints on Google’s Android Auto community forums spotted by 9to5Google . Users have reported Bluetooth connections will work briefly before dropping, or will only connect wirelessly once their phone has been rebooted. In some cases, Android Auto is randomly forcing connected phones to reboot without being prompted to do so. “The reboo...

On the one hand, Apple’s latest iPhone is a huge victory. The iPhone 16E comes with most of what you’d want from a smartphone — modern processor, good camera, nice design — for hundreds of dollars less than you’d typically spend on a brand-new device. On the other hand, it’s a bit odd that this thing exists at all. It’s missing a couple of the best things about the iPhone ecosystem — MagSafe, multiple cameras — and if you’re already spending $600 on a phone it’s not clear that another $200 is a particularly huge deal. So why does the 16E exist? And who is it for? On this episode of The Vergecast , we try and figure it out. With Nilay on vacation, David is joined by The Verge ’s Jake Kastrenakes and Allison Johnson to go through all the ins and outs of Apple’s latest smartphone. We talk about the trades Apple made to bring the price down, the ones it maybe should have made instead, and just how big a deal the new C1 modem might turn out to be. After t...

The Nothing Phone 3A and 3A Pro have leaked in new images and videos that show off the two phones’ designs and detail the key specs. So far, the two phones appear to be almost identical, with only two camera changes — and slightly different rear camera designs — to pull them apart. First Android Headlines leaked what appear to be official renders of the two new phones. The 3A and 3A Pro look similar, both using Nothing’s now-trademark semi-transparent design language and Glyph lighting system, in black and white versions. The two phones only appear to differ in their cameras: while the 3A has its three lenses laid out in a horizontal line, the 3A Pro has a more… avant garde arrangement, with the three lenses and flash in a sort of half-spiral in the circular camera module. Leaker Arsène Lupin then followed up with what appear to be the official reveal videos for each phone, detailing the core specs and showing the designs off in motion. Both phones seem to be powered by t...

Almost 18,000 Swagtron electric scooters are being recalled by Walmart due to fire and safety concerns regarding their lithium-ion batteries. There have been seven reports of SG-5 Swagger 5 Boost batteries “overheating, smoking, melting or igniting” according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) , including a fire that caused burn injuries and “substantial property damage” to a residential apartment building. The recall impacts about 17,970 SG-5 Swagger 5 Boost units sold at Walmart and Sam’s Club between May 2018 and October 2024, with customers being emailed instructions on how to receive a full refund. The affected models — SWGR5-V2-SLV, SWGR5-V2-2, SG5 Boost, SG-5S, 96262-2, 96262-9, SG-5S, and 96560-2 — cost between $175 and $450, and have their model numbers located on the side of the scooter deck. Swagtron itself, which sold the SG-5 Swagger 5 Boost directly via its own website, notably hasn’t issued a recall for the scooter. The CPSC said that Swagtron has actu...

What is this, a laptop for ants!? Today Oppo launched the Find N5 , the thinnest book-style foldable phone yet, but there’s more to the phone than a slim design: it’s capable of connecting to a Mac for file transfers and even remote control. It’s not quite the first Android phone to do so, but it is the only one you can buy outside of China. To link the Find N5 with a Mac you first have to install Oppo’s O Plus Connect app on the Mac, which will be available from Oppo’s website — I’ve been testing out a beta version. Linking the Mac to the phone is quick so long as they’re on the same Wi-Fi network, with all the phone’s controls built into the “Connection & sharing” section of its Settings app. As long as the two phones remain on the same network, you can browse the phone’s files directly from the Mac and transfer them wirelessly — in itself a coup, given that even wired file-sharing between Android phones and Macs is clunky and reliant on third-party software. More impressi...

Oppo’s Find N5 feels like the end game for foldable phones. Not because it’s make or break for a segment of the phone market that never quite took off like manufacturers hoped it would, but because I simply don’t know where we go from here. There’s scarcely room to make the phone thinner without ditching USB-C entirely; battery life, performance, and even cameras are now on par with other flagship phones; and this time, Oppo even managed to fit wireless charging and water resistance in, too. This is what we were promised all along. Now what? Hardware and cameras It’s hard to see how the hardware improves much further. At 8.93mm thick when closed, this is the thinnest foldable in the world, shaving almost half a millimeter off the previous record holder, Honor’s Magic V3 . It’s just 4.21mm thin when it’s open, which proves there’s still space to trim — Huawei’s trifold Mate XT runs to just 3.6mm — but we’re close to at least one hard physical limit. Oppo t...